HOT TAKES! - The Met Gala Feels Out of Touch Right Now!

0:00 So last night was the Met Gala, our gala, however you want to say it.

0:04 And before anybody comes to me, let me just say I love fashion.

0:07 You guys know that.

0:08 I think fashion is art.

0:09 I used to be more fashion-conscious than I am now.

0:11 The older I get, I'm like, what does it matter?

0:14 A lot of it is just and I I'm not

0:16 like I don't have to have the latest uh luxury thing.

0:20 It's not my thing.

0:20 I don't have to do the latest luxury thing.

0:22 I can go to Zara.

0:24 Look, I can go to when we used to shop at Target, I don't anymore.

0:27 I could go to Target and get something.

0:29 Uh when I used to go visit my mom, I would go to years ago,

0:31 I'd go get pajamas and stuff at at uh Walmart.

0:34 So I Look, it doesn't It matters not to me.

0:37 I do have some great clothes cuz when I worked at CNN,

0:40 got a clothing allowance and all of that.

0:41 But I'm not against fashion, okay?

0:44 So um I need fashion's biggest night of the year,

0:53 a biggest night to read the room.

0:56 Read the room.

0:57 Read the room.

1:02 The theme last night was was costume art, okay, or custom art.

1:07 And or costume art, excuse me, and the dress code was fashion is art.

1:15 [laughter] No[ __] fashion is art.

1:16 Like fashion is art.

1:18 Are you kidding me?

1:20 Of course fashion is art.

1:21 Couldn't they have come up with a better thing and I I have some ideas for them.

1:24 While your gas hit $4.45 on average a gallon, and I know a lot of you are paying

1:28 more than that, Spirit more than that, Spirit Airlines died,

1:31 you know, and 17,000 workers lost their jobs

1:34 and their health care on Saturday morning.

1:37 The war is in its 66th day.

1:40 72-year-old woman named Mary Hill, okay,

1:43 works in an Amazon warehouse battling cancer.

1:46 She works for $17 an hour.

1:49 And the man who owns Amazon, Jeff Bezos,

1:52 you think he makes $17,000 an hour an hour $17 an hour?

1:56 Reportedly dropped $10 million to sponsor the whole thing.

2:01 And he was supposed to stand at the top

2:03 of the steps greeting guests with Anna Wintour.

2:05 He did not.

2:06 He didn't walk the red carpet.

2:10 He went in through the side entrance because the protests outside were

2:14 so intense that he apparently thought it was better to avoid the cameras.

2:20 And what were protesters doing outside?

2:24 And what were the protesters outside?

2:27 That's what we want to know.

2:30 So, let's take let's take a look at some of the protests.

2:32 About 300 bottles of fake urine placed inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art

2:38 to protest Amazon's policy that does not give its drivers bathroom breaks.

2:44 So, they pee in bottles on the job making $17

2:50 an hour while Bezos makes millions of dollars per hour.

2:55 While he spent $10 million on a party

2:57 and protesters projected the face of Mary Hill,

3:01 the woman I said is dealing with cancer,

3:03 onto Bezos' luxury condo in Madison Square Park.

3:07 It's a 72-year-old Amazon warehouse worker

3:10 battling cancer living paycheck to paycheck.

3:14 So, he could look out of his window and see her face during

3:17 the party if he was too embarrassed to walk into through the front door.

3:24 Now, that was art.

3:26 That was not just a protest, that was poetry.

3:30 And I think that the Metropolitan of the Met

3:33 Gala needs to gain some of that energy.

3:37 That's the energy they they need.

3:39 Now, there were some people who made their feelings known.

3:41 Bella Hadid liked a video.

3:44 I mean, liking a video, come on, Bella Hadid.

3:46 Calling out the celebrities who chose uh to go.

3:50 Taraji P.

3:51 Henson, who I love, commented on the same video saying,

3:54 "I am so confused by some people that are going.

3:57 I'm just like, WTF are we doing?" And New York

4:02 City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said that he would not attend,

4:06 which really said everything to me.

4:08 And the biggest actress,

4:11 the most I believe important actress of our time is Meryl Streep,

4:15 who was supposed to be the co-chair, they said, reportedly,

4:20 um of this thing back in 2020, before COVID canceled it.

4:24 Well, this year, everybody thought that she was going to finally

4:26 show up at the Met Gala because of The Devil Wears Prada, all the press there.

4:30 She was on the Vogue cover with Anna Wintour,

4:32 and the whole cast was there, and Hathaway, Emily Blunt, Stanley Tucci.

4:37 Meryl Streep did not come.

4:39 Her rep says, "It wasn't has never quite been her scene." Now,

4:44 you can make that for what you will.

4:47 Here's where it really gets me, is that the theme is fashion is art.

4:53 And I believe that completely.

4:54 I mean, but I think it's so obvious.

4:55 Come on, you guys could have come up with a better theme.

4:58 But let me just tell you who actually built that idea from scratch,

5:01 because it was not Jeff Bezos.

5:03 It was not Anna Wintour.

5:05 It was not anyone really of their ilk.

5:08 Do you know who it was?

5:09 Can I give you a lesson about the people and look,

5:12 this is all related to the people who are feeling it now,

5:15 the working-class people, the poor people,

5:17 the black people, the Latino people, all of that.

5:20 The have-nots.

5:22 Do you guys know who Dapper Dan is in Harlem?

5:25 Daniel Day, born in Harlem, 1944.

5:28 This is where this comes from, and this is where they need to get back to.

5:32 Who He opened a boutique on 125th Street that never closed.

5:36 Who took Louis Vuitton and Gucci and put those logos

5:39 on tracksuits and bomber jackets and caps because his community wanted luxury,

5:44 and luxury would not come to them.

5:49 The people who dressed LL Cool J and Mike Tyson and Salt-N-Pepa,

5:54 who luxury fashion sued for years for copy copyright infringement.

6:02 And then they said, "Oh, wait a minute.

6:04 We can make some money from here

6:05 and then because the black folks and the rappers

6:08 and the people who were now coming

6:10 into and athletes were now buying luxury." And they said,

6:14 "Oh, we have to stop suing these people.

6:16 We have to bring them in so that we

6:18 can make the money." And then decades later crawling back

6:23 to the to collaborate with them because they finally admitted

6:27 that he had been right all along, meaning Dapper Dan.

6:31 So, it was Ann Lowe,

6:34 a black woman from Alabama who designed Jackie Kennedy's wedding dress in 1953,

6:40 the most famous wedding dress of the 20th century,

6:43 and almost nobody knows her name.

6:45 It was Zelda Wynn Valdes, the first black designer to open her own

6:50 shop on Broadway in 1948 who dressed Ella Fitzgerald

6:54 and Josephine Baker and Dorothy Dandridge and also designed

6:57 the original Playboy bunny costume from her shop on Broadway.

7:02 People you don't know about.

7:04 The Met Gala needs to read the[ __] room

7:08 cuz you have gone you have lost the plot.

7:12 It was Karl Kani from East New York, Brooklyn,

7:16 who invented the baggy jean silhouette that defined a generation.

7:20 Tupac wore him.

7:21 Biggie wore him as well.

7:23 It was Da- Daymond John who started FUBU, remember that?

7:29 In his mother's house in Queens.

7:31 For us, by us.

7:33 Built it from his kitchen table into a global empire.

7:36 It was the ballroom scene.

7:38 Started in Harlem in the Bronx in the 1960s and 70s

7:41 by black and Latino LGBTQ kids who had nowhere else to go,

7:45 who literally invented the runway walk.

7:49 All of those people you see strutting down the runway now,

7:51 swishing whatever, even Naomi Campbell,

7:54 whatever, that[ __] came from LGBTQ Q youth in Harlem who invented that walk.

8:01 And by the way, and also black models who invented that, models from Halston,

8:11 well, it wasn't from Halston.

8:12 First it was this fashion fair and they were the black models.

8:15 And then they needed models for this big show between Halston and it

8:19 was all kinds of designers and they were they had this thing at Versailles.

8:22 I don't know if you guys remember all of this.

8:24 Let me know if you if you know, you know.

8:26 And they saw all of these black women strutting down the runway,

8:30 not just walking like stick figures with no rhythm,

8:33 but they were they had rhythm, they had style.

8:37 And then now everybody is copying them.

8:41 Black culture is American culture.

8:44 Do not get it twisted.

8:46 And a lot of it invented by black women and black gays.

8:51 So all of this[ __] that you see now, all the fashion, everything, black people.

8:56 But just did not have the means to be able to market it and make it

9:00 and sell it and make the millions and billions

9:02 that people are making off of it now.

9:06 That's where all of that came from.

9:10 Kids who had nowhere else to go,

9:11 the LGBTQ plus kids, who literally invented the runway walk,

9:15 who invented voguing,

9:16 the Madonna thing that Madonna became rich off of, voguing, that was black kids,

9:21 black LGBTQ kids who literally invented the categories that fashion

9:28 houses now pay models thousands of dollars to perform, voguing.

9:33 They did it in community centers with no money

9:37 and no recognition and decades later luxury fashion called it avant-garde.

9:41 It was Virgil Abloh, son of Ghanaian immigrants,

9:46 who became the first [clears throat]

9:47 black artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear,

9:50 who died at 41, who changed luxury fashion forever.

9:58 I'm I mean and are you guys in for this history lesson?

10:05 Cuz today I did not come to play.

10:08 I came to slay.

10:09 Like the models.

10:11 Like all of the fashion models from back in the day.

10:14 I didn't come to play.

10:15 I came to slay this morning.

10:20 It was Telfar Clemens from Queens who created the shopping bag for everyone.

10:29 You know the shopping bag that everybody has and then it became a designer

10:31 shopping bag that has everybody's name on it and then it became a designer bag.

10:35 The most democratic luxury item in fashion history.

10:38 Fashion is art.

10:39 Yes, it is.

10:41 Black people from neighborhoods that looked nothing like the Metropolitan

10:45 Museum of Art built that truth from scratch with nothing

10:51 but creativity and pride and community and built something

10:54 the entire luxury fashion industry now copies and profits from.

10:59 And last night, the man who reportedly paid $10 million

11:02 to be associated with that legacy sneak through a side

11:05 entrance with a 72-year-old black woman's face when while

11:10 a 72-year-old black woman's face was being projected on his building.

11:16 I was listening to The Daily yesterday on the New York Times podcast app.

11:22 And it talked about the this is the biggest sort of, you know,

11:26 people have the rich people are becoming richer

11:29 and especially in this administration in recent history,

11:31 more so than any other time in history.

11:34 And the 1% of 0.1% at the top, they're making tons of money.

11:38 Anybody below that is not making as much money or no or no money at all.

11:44 And guess where all of the wealth is coming from?

11:47 From the 90% of the people who are

11:49 below that 1 of 0.1% That's the 90-some percent.

11:55 That's where the the wealth is coming from.

11:56 They are living and becoming billionaires off of us.

12:00 Off of you.

12:02 The people that they are trying to erase from the present and from history,

12:08 the blacks, the gays, the trans,

12:10 those are the people who shape culture, Met Gala.

12:13 And if you like art and any of those things,

12:15 you should always keep that top of mind.

12:18 And don't keep it top of mind and pretend

12:20 that you're doing it with a wink and a nod.

12:24 And I don't understand why these these people Why are people showing up?

12:30 Icons.

12:30 This is not This is not icons anymore, pretty much.

12:33 These are influencers.

12:36 Who is showing up and taking their pictures?

12:38 Why do I need the newest reality, limited series TV, whatever flash in the pan?

12:45 Like who Who cares?

12:48 All of this fashion stuff, all of the runway stuff, all of it, black people.

12:55 Current fashion, black people.

12:57 Music, black people.

12:59 Country music, black people.

13:04 So all of this came and I did not

13:05 see I saw some black people walking the runway.

13:09 I saw some black people who were on the boards,

13:11 but are they really aware or as they say woke,

13:15 the original meaning of the word woke,

13:20 before it was co-opted by people entitled people, privileged people who said,

13:24 "No, this is what we want this word to mean.

13:27 Cancellation.

13:27 That's not what it means.

13:31 Fashion is art.

13:32 Black people taught the world that.

13:36 They had nothing but creativity and pride.

13:38 And and built something as I said that the world

13:41 and the fashion industry now profits off of.

13:44 Not just the fashion industry, the agents, the managers, the team owners.

13:58 We have to realize our power and realize the creativity

14:02 that we have because we had to have that creativity.

14:05 We had to think of other ways to go around the system

14:08 because the system did not accept us and still doesn't in many ways.

14:11 So and when people in this society when they say there is no systemic racism,

14:15 everything is equal, this is that's[ __] Thanks for watching everybody.

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